Christmas may be the best time to finally get off that PC and spend time with friends and family, but users would do well to ensure that their computers are in shape for some serious updating. Come Patch Tuesday, Microsoft will be releasing a large number of patches to fix flaws in its software products used by millions globally.

Nobody likes to deal with regular security updates, but everybody knows that having them is important to ensure that them don’t fall victim to shady people who have no qualms about stealing private date from PCs through any means possible.

Needless to say, with Christmas just round the corner, the last thing any self-respecting PC will want to receive as a ‘Christmas present’ is the ‘gift’ of having to deal with a computer than has been compromised and hijacked by said shady characters. And the vulnerabilities being fixed in month’s upcoming Patch Tuesday are quite numerous, as can be seen below (click on the images for the larger version):

As system updates have been known to break Windows occasionally, the same friendly advice applies: always back up your data into external media, create a system restore point, and ensure that the update process is not interrupted at all costs.

Last but not least, we would like to remind our readers that this is only an advance notice from Microsoft regarding the patches: the software giant has been known to add extra patches or drop some of them at little to no notice. As such, the best source of information for available patches on the actual day is still the Windows Update application that sits quietly in Windows’ Control Panel.